The evolutionary social psychology of off-record
indirect speech acts

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The evolutionary social psychologyof off-record indirect speech actsSTEVEN PINKERAbstractThis paper proposes a new analysis of indirect speech in the framework ofgame theory, social psychology, and evolutionary psychology. It builds onthe theory of Grice, which tries to ground indirect speech in pure rationality(the demands of e‰cient communication between two cooperating agents)and on the Politeness Theory of Brown and Levinson, who proposed thatpeople cooperate not just in exchanging data but in saving face (both thespeaker’s and the hearer’s). I suggest that these theories need to be supple-mented because they assume that people in conversation always cooperate.A reﬂection on how a pair of talkers may have goals that conﬂict as well ascoincide requires an examination of the game-theoretic logic of plausibledenial, both in legal contexts, where people’s words may be held againstthem, and in everyday life, where the sanctions are social rather than judi-cial. This in turn requires a theory of the distinct kinds of relationships thatmake up human social life, a consideration of a new role for commonknowledge in the use of indirect speech, and ultimately the paradox of ra-tional ignorance, where we choose not to know something relevant to ourinterests.1.The evolutionary social psychology of o¤-record indirect speech actsIndirect speech is the phenomenon in which a speaker says somethinghe doesn’t literally mean, knowing that the hearer will interpret it as heintended:Would you like to come up and see my etchings? [a sexual come-on].If you could pass the salt, that would be great [a polite request].Nice house you got there. Would be a real shame if something hap-pened to it [a threat].Intercultural Pragmatics 4-4 (2007), 437–4611612-295X/07/0004–0437DOI 10.1515/IP.2007.0236 Walter de Gruyter438Steven PinkerWe’re counting on you to show leadership in our Campaign for theFuture [a solicitation of a donation].Gee, o‰cer, I was wondering whether there might be some way wecould take care of the ticket here [a bribe].These ‘‘o¤-record indirect speech acts’’ have long been a major topic inpragmatics, and they have considerable practical importance as well,including an understanding rhetoric, negotiation and diplomacy, and theprosecution of extortion, bribery, and sexual harassment. They also poseimportant questions about our nature as social beings. This paper,adapted from a book which uses semantics and pragmatics as a windowinto human nature (Pinker 2007), uses indirect speech as a window intohuman social relationships. In doing so it seeks to augments the currentunderstanding of indirect speech with ideas from game theory, evolution-ary psychology, and social psychology.Intuitively, the explanation for indirect speech seems obvious: we use itto escape embarrassment, avoid awkwardness, save face, or reduce socialtension. But as with many aspects of the mind, the danger with common-sense explanations is that we are trying to explain a puzzle by appealingto intuitions that themselves need an explanation. In this case, we need toknow what ‘‘face’’ is, and why we have emotions like embarrassment,tension, and shame that trade in it. Ideally, those enigmas will be ex-plained in terms of the inherent problems faced by social agents who ex-change information.2.Background: Conversational maxims and the theory of politenessAny analysis of indirect speech must begin with Grice’s Cooperative Prin-ciple and the theory of conversational maxims and conversational impli-cature that ﬂows from it (Grice 1975). Grice proposed that conversationhas a rationality of its own, rooted in the needs of partners to cooperateto get their messages across. Speakers tacitly adhere to a CooperativePrinciple, tailoring their utterances to the momentary purpose and direc-tion of the conversation. That requires monitoring the knowledge andexpectations of one’s interlocutor and anticipating her reaction to one’swords. (Keeping with convention, I will refer to the generic speaker as a‘‘he’’ and the generic hearer as a ‘‘she.’’) Grice famously ﬂeshed out theprinciple in his four conversational ‘‘maxims,’’ quantity (say no more orless than is required), quality (be truthful), manner (be clear and orderly),and relevance (be relevant), which are commandments that people tac-itly follow to further the conversation e‰ciently. Indirect speech may beThe evolutionary social psychology of o¤-record indirect speech acts439explained by the way the maxims are observed in the breach. Speakersoften ﬂout them, counting on their listeners to interpret their intent in away that would make it consistent with the Cooperative Principle afterall. That’s why, Grice noted, we would interpret a review that describeda singer as ‘‘producing a series of notes’’ as negative rather than factual.The reviewer intentionally violated the maxim of Manner (he was notsuccinct); readers assume he was providing the kind of information theyseek in a review; the readers conclude that the reviewer was implicatingthat the performance was substandard. Grice called this line of reasoninga conversational implicature.Grice came to conversation from the bloodless world of logic and saidlittle about why people bother to implicate their meanings rather than justblurting them out. We discover the answer when we remember that peo-ple are not just in the business of downloading information into eachother’s heads but are social animals concerned with the impressions theymake. An implicature involves two meanings: the literal content (some-times called the sentence meaning) and the intended message (sometimescalled the speaker meaning). The literal sentence meaning must be doingsome work or the speaker would not bother to use it in the ﬁrst place. Inmany implicatures involved in o¤-record indirect speech acts, the in-tended message is negative but the literal content is positive or neutral.Perhaps speakers are trying to eat their cake and have it too—they wantto impugn something they dislike while staving o¤ the impression thatthey are whiners or malcontents. Dews, Kaplan, and Winner (1995)showed that people have a better impression of speakers who express acriticism with sarcasm (‘‘What a great game you just played!’’) than withdirect language (‘‘What a lousy game you just played!’’). The sarcasticspeakers, compared with the blunt ones, are seen as less angry, less criti-cal, and more in control.The double message conveyed with an implicature is nowhere put togreater use than in the commonest kind of indirect speech, politeness. Intheir seminal work Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use, Brownand Levinson (1987b) extended Grice’s theory by showing how peoplein many (perhaps all) cultures use politeness to lubricate their socialinteractions.Politeness Theory begins with Go¤man’s (1967) observation that whenpeople interact they constantly worry about maintaining a commoditycalled ‘‘face’’ (from the idiom ‘‘to save face’’). Go¤man deﬁned face asa positive social value that a person claims for himself. Brown and Lev-inson divide it into positive face, the desire to be approved (speciﬁcally,that other people want for you what you want for yourself ), and nega-tive face, the desire to be unimpeded or autonomous. The terminology440Steven Pinkerpoints to a fundamental duality in social life which goes by manynames: solidarity and status, connection and autonomy, communion andagency, intimacy and power, communal sharing and authority ranking(Fiske 1992, 2004; Haslam 2004; Holtgraves 2002). Later we will seehow these wants come from two of the three major social relations inhuman life.Brown and Levinson argue that Grice’s Cooperative Principle appliesto the maintenance of face as well as to the communication of data. Con-versationalists work together, each trying to maintain his own face andthe face of his partner. The challenge is that most kinds of speech poseat least some threat to the face of the hearer. The mere act of initiatinga conversation imposes a demand on the hearer’s time and attention. Is-suing an imperative challenges her status and autonomy. Making a re-quest puts her in the position where she might have to refuse, earningher a reputation as stingy or selﬁsh. Telling something to someone im-plies that she was ignorant of the fact in the ﬁrst place. And then thereare criticisms, boasts, interruptions, outbursts, the telling of bad news,and the broaching of divisive topics, all of which can injure the hearer’sface directly.At the same time, people have to get on with the business of life, andin doing so they have to convey requests and news and complaints. Thesolution is to make amends with politeness: the speaker sugarcoats hisutterances with niceties that rea‰rm his concern for the hearer or thatacknowledge her autonomy. Brown and Levinson call the stratagemspositive and negative politeness, though better terms are sympathy anddeference.The essence of politeness-as-sympathy is to simulate a degree of close-ness by pretending to want what the hearer wants for herself. Two famil-iar examples are the impotent bidding of good fortune (Be well, Have anice day) and the feigned inquiry into the person’s well-being (How areyou?, How’s it going?). One step beyond the ‘‘ﬁctitious benevolence’’ ofpoliteness is ﬁctitious solidarity. Speakers may address their hearers withbogus terms of endearment like my friend, mate, buddy, pal, honey, dear,brother, and fellas; use slang connected to an in-group, as in Lend me twobucks; or may include the listener in their plans, as in Let’s have anotherbeer.Politeness-as-deference (negative politeness) is invoked most of all withcommands and requests, which are among the most face-threateningspeech acts because they challenge the hearer’s autonomy by assumingher readiness to comply. The speaker is ordering the hearer around, orat least putting her out, something you don’t do to a stranger or a supe-rior and might even think twice about doing with an intimate. So requestsThe evolutionary social psychology of o¤-record indirect speech acts441are often accompanied by various forms of groveling, such as question-ing rather than commanding (e.g., Will you lend me your car?), expressingpessimism (I don’t suppose you might close the window), and acknowledg-ing a debt (I’d be eternally grateful if you would . . .).Politeness, according to Brown and Levinson, is calibrated to the levelof the threat to the hearer’s face. The threat level in turn depends on thesize of the imposition, the social distance from the hearer (the lack of in-timacy or solidarity), and the power gap between them. People kiss upmore obsequiously when they are asking for a bigger favor, when thehearer is a stranger, and when the hearer has more status or power. Afully loaded request like ‘‘I’m terribly sorry to trouble you, and I wouldn’task unless I were desperate, but I’d be eternally grateful if you think youcould possibly . . .’’ would sound smarmy if it were used to ask a strangerfor a small favor like the time, or if it were used to ask a bigger favor (likethe use of a computer) of a spouse or an assistant.Indirect speech acts, according to the theory, are even higher up the po-liteness scale than deferential (negative) politeness. In these speech acts, arequest is not stated baldly but conveyed with the help of an implicature.The result is a ‘‘whimperative’’ like Can you pass the salt? or If you couldpass the salt, that would be great. Taken literally, the ﬁrst example violatesthe maxim of Relevance, because the answer to the question is alreadyknown. The second one violates the maxim of Quality, because the conse-quent of the conditional is an overstatement. So the hearer interpretsthem as requests, while noting from the literal wording that the speakerwas seeking to avoid the appearance of treating her like a ﬂunky.Because a cliche´d indirect request is recognized as a request by anycompetent English speaker, it is e¤ectively ‘‘on the record.’’ A speakerwho says Can you pass the salt? in ordinary dinnertime circumstancescannot plausibly deny that he has asked for something. But according toBrown and Levinson, if an indirect speech act is freshly minted ratherthan pulled o¤ the shelf, its e¤ect on the hearer is di¤erent. The requestis now ‘‘o¤ the record.’’ When a speaker thinks up a novel indirect re-quest, like The chowder is pretty bland or They never seem to have enoughsalt shakers at this restaurant, the hearer can ignore the comment withoutpublicly rebu‰ng the request. For this reason, Brown and Levinson arguethat o¤-record indirect speech acts coined for the occasion—hints, under-statements, idle generalizations, and rhetorical questions—are the politestforms of all. A speaker can say It’s too dark to read as a way to ask ahearer to turn on the lights, or The lawn has got to be mowed instead of‘‘Mow the lawn.’’ According to politeness theory, then, with o¤-recordindirect speech the hearer is implicitly given the opportunity to ignorethe request without a public refusal, which also means that if she complies442Steven Pinkerwith the request, it’s not because she’s taking orders. According to Brownand Levinson, this saves face for both of them, especially the hearer withher desire for autonomy.3.Beyond cooperationPoliteness Theory has been tested in many experiments (see Brown &Levinson 1987a; Clark & Schunk 1980; Fraser 1990; Holtgraves 2002),and many of its claims have been conﬁrmed. The use of the proposed po-liteness strategies indeed makes a request sound more polite; indirect re-quests sound more polite than direct ones; and the degree of impositionmatters, as does the relative power of the speaker and the hearer.But according to several literature reviews, one claim has not come outas well. Brown and Levinson claimed that face threat was a single scale,the result of adding up the power disparity, the social distance, and thedegree of imposition. They claimed that the three kinds of politenesswere arranged along a scale, too. Sympathy expresses a little bit of polite-ness, and is suitable for smaller face threats. Deference expresses more,and is suitable for bigger ones. And o¤-record indirect speech acts (onescoined for the occasion) express the most politeness, and are suitable forthe biggest threats.In both cases, Brown and Levinson may have collapsed qualitativelydi¤erent dimensions onto a single scale. Rather than having a singleface-threat meter in their heads, and a single politeness meter that tracksit, people tend to target certain kinds of face threat with certain kindsof politeness (Holtgraves 2002). For instance, to criticize a friend (whichthreatens solidarity), people tend to emphasize sympathetic politeness(‘‘Hey, let’s go over this paper and see if we can bring it up to your usualstandards’’). But to ask a big favor (which threatens power), people tendto emphasize deferential politeness, as in the cringing request to borrowsomeone’s computer (‘‘I’m terribly sorry to bother you . . .’’).Also, o¤-record indirect speech—the topic of this paper—didn’t ﬁt intothe scale at all. Politeness Theory deemed it the politest strategy of all,but people said it was far less polite than deferential politeness (Holt-graves, 2002). In fact, in some cases it can be downright rude, like Didn’tI tell you yesterday to pick up your room? or Shouldn’t you tell me who iscoming to the party? One reason is that if the hearer’s competence andwillingness are questioned too blatantly, it suggests that she is inept oruncooperative. Another is that an indirect request can make the speakersound devious and manipulative, and force the listener to do a lot of men-tal spadework to ﬁgure out what he was trying to say.The evolutionary social psychology of o¤-record indirect speech acts443The fact that indirect speech acts are not so considerate to the hearer af-ter all brings up another problem. The examples with which we began—veiled threats, oblique bribes, sexual come-ons—are hardly examples ofa speaker being polite. A merchant listening to an advisory from the localracketeer on the many accidents that can befall a store surely doesn’t seeit that way. And the cop with his ticket book, or the woman at the eleva-tor door, sensing the indecent proposal in the innocent question, could beforgiven for thinking that the propositioner was looking out for his inter-ests, not theirs (though as we shall see, there can be complicity in thosecases as well).A ﬁnal problem for Politeness Theory is the built-in dilemma in itstreatment of o¤-record requests. If an implicature is too much of a trea-sure hunt, the speaker will have missed an opportunity. The hearer mighthave been perfectly happy to comply with his request, if only she knew hewas making one! (In an episode of Seinfeld, George Costanza turneddown his date’s invitation to come up to her apartment for co¤ee, realiz-ing too late that, in his words, ‘‘ ‘Co¤ee’ doesn’t mean co¤ee . . . . ‘Co¤ee’means sex!’’). On the other hand, if the implicature is so easy that thehearer can ﬁgure it out without fail, then it should be obvious enoughfor any other intelligent person to ﬁgure out, too, so it’s not clear whythe request should be perceived as being ‘‘o¤ the record.’’ Who couldclaim to be fooled by the line about the etchings, or about settling theticket right then and there?The Cooperative Principle and Politeness Theory are a good start, butthey are incomplete. Like many good-of-the-group theories in socialscience, they assume that the speaker and the hearer are working in per-fect harmony (Pinker 2002). We need to understand what happens whenthe interests of a speaker and a hearer are partly in conﬂict, as they sooften are in real life. And we need to distinguish the kinds of relationshipspeople have, and how each is negotiated and maintained, rather thanstringing all forms of face threat into a single scale, and doing the samewith all forms of face saving. Finally, we need a deeper analysis of theenigmatic commodity called ‘‘face,’’ and how it depends on the equallyelusive ‘‘record’’ such that requests can be ‘‘on’’ it or ‘‘o¤ ’’ it.4.Plausible deniability as a strategy of conﬂictTo get some purchase on nebulous concepts like ‘‘providing an out,’’‘‘plausible deniability,’’ and ‘‘on the record,’’ let’s begin with a scenarioin which their meanings are clear-cut. Consider a perfect Gricean speakerwho says exactly what he means when he says anything at all. Maxim444Steven PinkerMan is pulled over for running a red light and is pondering whether tobribe the o‰cer. Since he obeys the maxims of conversation more assidu-ously than he obeys the laws of tra‰c or the laws of bribery, the only wayhe can bribe the o‰cer is by saying, ‘‘If you let me go without a ticket, I’llpay you ﬁfty dollars.’’Unfortunately, he doesn’t know whether the o‰cer is dishonest andwill accept the bribe or is honest and will arrest him for attempting tobribe an o‰cer. Any scenario like this in which the best course of actiondepends on the choices of another actor is in the province of game theory.In game theory, the conundrum where one actor does not know thevalues of the other has been explored by Thomas Schelling (1960: 139–142), who calls it the Identiﬁcation Problem. The payo¤s can be summa-rized like this, where the rows represent the driver’s choices, the columnsrepresent the di¤erent kinds of o‰cer he might be facing, and the con-tents of the squares represent what will happen to the driver:DishonestHonesto‰cero‰cerDon’t bribeTra‰c ticketTra‰c ticketBribeGo freeArrest for briberyThe allure of each choice (row) is determined by the sum of the payo¤s ofthe two cells in that row weighted by their probabilities. If the driverdoesn’t try to bribe the o‰cer (ﬁrst row), then it doesn’t matter how hon-est the o‰cer is; either way the driver gets a ticket. But if he does o¤er thebribe (second row), the stakes are much higher either way. If Maxim Manis lucky and is facing a dishonest cop, the cop will accept the bribe andsend him on his way without a ticket. But if he is unlucky and is facingan honest cop, he will be handcu¤ed, read his rights, and arrested forbribery. The rational choice between bribing and not bribing will dependon the size of the tra‰c ﬁne, the proportion of bad and good cops on theroads, and the penalties for bribery, but neither choice is appealing.But now consider a di¤erent driver, Implicature Man, who knows howto implicate an ambiguous bribe, as in ‘‘So maybe the best thing wouldbe to take care of it here.’’ Suppose he knows that the o‰cer can workthrough the implicature and recognize it as an intended bribe, and healso knows that the o‰cer knows that he couldn’t make a bribery chargestick in court because the ambiguous wording would prevent a prosecutorfrom proving his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Implicature Man nowhas a third option:The evolutionary social psychology of o¤-record indirect speech acts445DishonestHonesto‰cero‰cerDon’t bribeTra‰c ticketTra‰c ticketBribeGo freeArrest for briberyImplicated bribeGo freeTra‰c ticketThe payo¤s in this new, third row combine the very big advantage ofbribing a dishonest cop with the relatively small penalty of failing to bribean honest one. We have explained the evolution of Implicature Man.Well, almost. We also have to take the point of view of an honest o‰-cer and the legal system he serves. Why wouldn’t an honest o‰cer arrestanyone who o¤ered a veiled bribe? If it’s obvious to him, it might beobvious to a jury, so he has a chance of putting a bad guy behind bars.To explain why the o‰cer wouldn’t arrest people at the hint of a bribe,making implicature as dangerous as naked bribery, we must assume twothings, both reasonable. One is that even if all dishonest drivers o¤erremarks that can be interpreted (correctly) as implicated bribes, somehonest drivers make those remarks too, as innocent observations. So anyarrest might be a false arrest. The second assumption is that an unsuccess-ful arrest is costly, exposing the o‰cer to a charge of false arrest and thepolice department to punitive damages. Then the o‰cer’s decision matrixwould look like this:DishonestHonestdriverdriverDon’t arrestTra‰c ticketTra‰c ticketArrestSuccessfulFalse arrestConviction(Of course from his point of view a tra‰c ticket is a good thing, not a badthing.) The appeal of arresting the driver will depend on the values of theoutcomes in the four cells and on their probabilities. And those probabil-ities will depend on the proportion of dishonest and honest drivers whoutter the ambiguous remark, that is, on the ratio of the numbers of eventsin the left and right columns. If the remark sounds close enough to aninnocuous remark that plenty of honest drivers might make it (or, atleast, enough of them so that a jury could not convict the speaker forthose words beyond a reasonable doubt), then the odds of a successful446Steven Pinkerconviction go down, the odds of a false arrest go up, and the appeal ofthe ‘‘Arrest’’ row would be lowered. And that is how Implicature Mancan force the o‰cer’s hand. He can craft his remark so that a dishonesto‰cer will detect it as an implicated bribe, but an honest o‰cer can’t besure (or at least can’t take the chance) that it is one.A crucial aspect of this analysis is that indirect speech is not an ex-ample of pure cooperation. Implicature Man is manipulating an honesto‰cer’s choices to his own advantage and to the o‰cer’s disadvantage.Though not fully consistent with the Cooperative Principle, it is consis-tent with the theory by biologists such as Dawkins and Krebs (1978)that communication in the animal kingdom can often be a form of ma-nipulation, not just information-sharing.5.Plausible deniability in non-legal contextsA veiled bribe to a police o‰cer is an example in which a person’s wordsare on the record and the stakes are tangible, such as tra‰c ticket or anarrest for bribery. What about everyday life, where o¤ers and requestscan be tendered without fear of legal penalties? In the give-and-take of or-dinary conversation one might think that we are free to speak our minds,without worrying that the way a hearer parses our words could land us injail. But in fact when it comes to everyday bribes, threats, and o¤ers, ourown emotions make us watch our words as carefully as if we were in legaljeopardy, and we all turn into Implicature Man.When would a law-abiding citizen be tempted to o¤er a bribe? Here isa real-life example. You want to go to the hottest restaurant in town. Youhave no reservation. Why not o¤er ﬁfty dollars to the maitre d’ if he willseat you immediately? This was the assignment given to the writer BruceFeiler by Gourmet magazine (Feiler 2000). The results are eye-openingfor any linguist or psychologist interested in the social psychology of indi-rect speech.The ﬁrst result is predictable to most people who imagine themselves inFeiler’s shoes: the assignment is terrifying. Though no one has ever beenarrested for bribing a maitre d’, Feiler felt like a grievous sinner:I am nervous, truly nervous. As the taxi bounces southward through he trendierneighborhoods of Manhattan—Flatiron, the Village, SoHo—I keep imaginingthe possible retorts of some incensed maitre d’.‘‘What kind of establishment do you think this is?’’‘‘How dare you insult me?’’‘‘You think you can get in with that?’’

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The evolutionary social psychology of off-record indirect speech acts

This paper proposes a new analysis of indirect speech in the framework of game theory, social psychology, and evolutionary psychology. It builds on the theory of Grice, which tries to ground indirect speech in pure rationality (the demands of efficient communication between two cooperating agents) and on the Politeness Theory of Brown and Levinson, who proposed that people cooperate not just in exchanging data but in saving face (both the speaker's and the hearer's). I suggest that these theories need to be supplemented because they assume that people in conversation always cooperate

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